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Although my Twitter profile photo is always the Dangerous Talk “A,” my facebook profile photo is usually me. This week, atheists are asked to change our facebook photos to the uniform scarlet A, this year in grey, for the week.

The reason for this is so that people on facebook and see that there are a lot of atheists as their friends and family. It is a way to encourage others to come out of the atheist closet and as a way to humanize atheists to those believers who might not realize that they know an atheist.

What I don’t like about A-Week is that we are asked to have the same uniform symbol. Atheists aren’t generally a fan of uniformity and I am no different. Last year, it was fun to see various atheists put their individual take on the A-symbol. Many incorporated it into their photo. I usually use the Dangerous Talk A that was designed by a friend of mine.

One of the down sides on A-week is that when I post of religious pages, my comments are ignored before they are read. Also, since many other websites use facebook as a login, any comments I make on other websites might also be ignored without being read.

Still, I think A-week is a good idea, but I do wish that atheists would do as they did last year and put some creativity and individuality into their profile-A. I think this is more interesting than the standard A-Week image we are told to use and it still gets our message across. So go and be creative like everyone else!

I listened to Jennifer Michael Hecht talking about the negative theism of early church fathers like Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. From this – there is nothing one can say about gods that could ever be in any sense of the word ‘true’. A god that can be named or described is not a god.

So now I subscribe to Negative Atheism. There is nothing that I can say about the absence of gods that could ever be true. By true I mean a sound hypothesis that could be falsified or a provisional hypothesis in the Bayesian sense that could be improved by an accumulation of facts about atheism.

If I never laid eyes on a fire engine there is nothing I could say about fire engines.